[theme-reviewers] Minified CSS

[Austin Matzko]

On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 9:19 AM, Otto <otto at ottodestruct.com> wrote:
> Folks, seriously? This is not a GPL issue.
>
> Even minified CSS is still CSS, and it's not rendered uneditable by
> minification. Use any CSS Beautifier and voila, it'll add the
> whitespace right back for you.

And I can un-obscure JS <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/15262>
and even decompile a binary file.

Just because obscured or compiled files can be reverse-engineered
doesn't mean that they meet the requirements of the GPL.  Chip's
one-rule CSS example demonstrates that at the fringes GPL-compliance
can be vague, but that doesn't imply there are no boundaries.

On Fri Feb 18 15:11:20 UTC 2011, Chip Bennett <chip at chipbennett.net> wrote:
> Whether or not that text file is easy to read is completely irrelevant to compliance to the license under which that text file is distributed.

This strains the natural interpretation of "preferred form of the work
for making modifications to it."  It also makes the unfortunate
implication that PHP obfuscators generate GPL-compatible source code.

> How the FSF "interprets" that, or how it coincides with their "philosophy", is essentially irrelevant.

True: a license's real test is in court; everything outside of that is
speculation.  Lacking a relevant court case so far, I'm choosing to
side with prima facie and the FSF and admit that our disagreement on
this point seems intractable.